Les plus lus ▸
Dante
I never thought I would give up my life so easily,
I was taken back by your words and held onto them tightly.
Now I still hold onto them, although I look at them with no trace of thought,
I was never happy with you, I was scared and frail,
You taught me many things, and told me I didn't deserve most of life itself.
I had wished that I had put my life aside that day, but now I crave being alive.
I crave seeing my future, and where it will take me.
I look forward to seeing my partner and speaking with them.
I am older and decided to save myself from the darkness your finger tips had held.
My chest doesn't hurt before I sleep
I want to live
I want to decide for myself
I want to love and hold my hands out
Laying in a hospital bed,
Fighting to stay alive,
Friends and family preparing for the worst,
Odds against me to survive,
My eyes close,
Images then appear,
A multitude of memories,
As I hear my mother in tears,
Obstacles presented everyday,
One hurdle after another,
Tripping and falling to the ground,
Scraped, bloodied, but refusing to lie down,
From complications at birth,
To epilepsy at 4,
A man stealing my innocence,
A grand mal and brain tumor,
Just when you think,
life couldn't get any worse,
you try to end it.
Just to be forced to breathe again.
I'm still breathing
after everything
Padding along among roots and stobs in shade,
I take the north-slope path to see old friends:
red huckleberry and mountain hemlock
subsisting on nurse logs amid moss; vanilla
leaf, false Solomon's seal, sword fern, bracken,
sorrel, twinflower, wild ginger, salmonberry,
maiden-hair fern, ninebark, viney maple.
They seem well; it's steep shade and deep
mouldering duff. Enough rain has alighted
upon this slope for centuries to build tall firs,
straight cedars, twisted, hoary, wrangling maples.
Yet the riverbed below seems troubled, shrunken.
Stones I never see have suddenly shown
themselves, shouldering past dried caddis cases
and empty snail shells, standing in desiccated air.
When Polyhymnia sends refracted light
shimmering toward parched and shriveled roots,
seeking some semblance of promise kept alive
between her hands, her well, her seeds and soil,
A bit of fluff, a female Anna's, comes
to perch nearby, cocking its tiny head
and waiting. Waiting for the hose to steady
its cold blast toward some fainting eggplant
or tomatillo, ready for a burst of aimed
delight, catching one rainbowed drop of water
short, then flitting to the fence again,
shivering. To the Muse of hymns and farmers it's
a game, to the throbbing ball of feathers more.
Its heart will stop without the gift of rain.
A flock of a hundred or more crows
In echelons of three or four
Were flying obvious search-patterns
Over a square mile of wet, recently ploughed
Country in Perth County, Ontario;
In spring so cold you might still call it winter.
There was no missing the fact of
Their intent to find what was to be found
For their provision. Without lamenting
The shortage of life's commodities,
They looked for food with such sure diligence
That discovery was a certainty;
For which they would pay neither taxes or rent.
I told you that ‘tenacious’ meant tough.
A few days later we went out to eat
and you described your steak as tenacious.
That didn’t sound quite right – a person
can be tenacious, but an inanimate slab of flesh,
surely, can’t. I spent the rest of the meal
absorbed in this. Then as we held hands
on the way back, you told me about everything;
about what happened and what he did.
I felt your hand in mine, and knew
that you were still alive. You can call
a piece of meat tenacious if you want.
Damn it, you can do whatever you like.
You can recreate the very foundations of Being.
If you want to call your steak tenacious,
then who am I to object?
Why shall I keep the old name?
What is a name anywhere anyway?
A name is a cheap thing all fathers and mothers leave each child:
A job is a job and I want to live, so
Why does God Almighty or anybody else care whether
I take a new name to go by ?